The prior art systems raise, lower and rotate a component to be tinned in a dip soldering process by means of pneumatic drives. A drawback of this is that there is little or no control over the degree and rate of movement of the component.
Our application Ser. No. 08/025585 describes a dip soldering apparatus which uses independent motor drives for raising and lowering the component and for rotating it. This provides much more flexible control over the tinning process. When tinning or soldering leads which are closely spaced, there is a tendency for solder bridging between the leads. This is particularly a problem when soldering components to a printed circuit board.